I know I'm a little late, but I've been pointed at this thread by someone on my Hayai thread. I've contacted Robert at
Ubiquiti to get some discussions going.
The problem we're facing at the moment is the sheer cost of purchasing bandwidth and licenses. A nationwide license is 10 Cr. Plus there is something like 25 lakh per month or per year or something as some ongoing cost. Not to mention a basic 155Mbps VSNL line setting the ISP back a good 17 lakhs per month (works out to be just short of US$400k/year).
Plus the overheads: I've worked out that, based on Mumbai prices, the *basic* network access cost is somewhere around Rs 650/month - and thats before we even start transferring data.
I may have inflated some figures, but from what I can ascertain, they should be roughly accurate. Based on the price of the 155Mbits line, we're looking at Rs34 per gigabyte of transfer. Additionally, if we want to peer, we're looking at NIXI charges plus Rs50 per gigabyte downloaded.
So, therefore, a 1Mbit line has the potential to download 256GB per month. We realize that not everyone is going to leave their computers on 24x7, so let's reduce that by 50%.Thats still 128GB at say Rs34/GB. Thats 4,300 - at cost price. So it's not the speed that costs, really, it's the Gigabytes. I think the thinking behind plans now is "if we reduce the amount of gigabytes they *can* transfer in a month by giving them slower speeds, then we'll make more money".
My thinking is this: Give everyone 10, 20, 50, 100Mbits, but maybe add a fair-usage policy of some kind (similar to Airtel... boooo, yes, I know). With transfers being completed in merely seconds instead of in hours, the network remains a lot freer than it otherwise is: think 8-lane highway versus country road. If one thing gets stuck on a country road, everything else has to wait. On the Autobahn however, you can do 200km/h no problem (and I'm proud to say that I have done).
Of course, the more bandwidth we buy wholesale, the cheaper it becomes, but still not enough. The problem here is that the big 3 have a tri-opoly on bandwidth: if you want it, you have to buy from
Tata (SMW3, SMW4 and now Seacom), Reliance (FLAG) or Bharti (i2i, SMW4). The USA and the UK have got roughly 30 providers each, so the competition is a lot heavier, and the prices are a lot cheaper.
I have met with Railtel, and those of you from the earlier comments in this thread will know that it is now well past April, and they're still in that little corner of Bangalore. But they are interested in what we're doing, so we might be able to get some unlimited plans going yet!
All this said, however, I think I've come up with some good ways to mitigate these problems regardless of who we end up having to purchase from (until we have $650m spare to build our own marine cable), so I would encourage those of you looking for a little more information in-depth to check this forum as well
https://broadband.forum/hayai-broadband/50202-hayai-broadband/ - please join the conversation and tell me what you think!
